Katahdin Dorper cross lambs born April 2012. They’ll be coming home to Our Farm at the beginning of June, and we’re really looking forward to them becoming the foundation of our flock. Sorry about the voiceover, they were just so cute that I couldn’t help the babytalk!

I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since I posted a update here, but time flies when you’re keeping busy! We’ve been prepping out in the garden, applying compost to garden beds, laying out drip irrigation tape and working on Spring weeds in preparation for planting, working on the greenhouse (just about ready for putting the cover on it, keep your fingers crossed for warm & wind-less weather next weekend please!), and getting ready for the arrival of our first batch of chicks this coming Wednesday.

Since we’re only a little over a month away from first harvest, I’ll be getting in touch soon to let those of you with small shares if you’ll be in Week A (starting June 2nd) or Week B (starting June 9th).

Funny weather this year, eh? Last year, we had so much rain that we couldn’t get into the garden on time to plant and had our first harvest delayed by two weeks – it put such a dent in our plans that we worked our butts off to get this greenhouse so we wouldn’t have that worry this year. And of course now I’m practically doing a rain dance to get some moisture to fall from the sky. We had a nice good stretch of rain and snow last week, which helped things a bit… but we could still use a few more days here and there to keep the garden moving along. It may be chilly today, but I’m going to transplant out the kale and onions and beets, and seed the spinach and swiss chard. Peas are up finally, after we got that rain! It won’t be long now…

Signed,

Your busy, happy farmer.

Thank you to everyone for your interest. Just a quick update to let you know that we are sold out for the 2012 CSA. If you’d like to get on our waiting list for next year just send an email to ourfarmcsa@gmail.com with the subject line “2013 CSA waiting list” and we’ll do our best to accommodate you next year.

Even if you’re on the waiting list for the CSA, don’t forget to follow us on Facebook to get blog posts automatically in your news feed – we’ll post an update every week during harvest season with at least one tasty recipe for seasonal veggies. It’ll be like following along with the CSA to get in the swing of things.

Now that the day’s turned to sunshine and I’ve bought every tray that Canadian Tire had left in the store, I’m going to grab a bite to eat and start some more lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower.

Hi there!

So, um, I went out to the garden early this morning to get the peas planted into the four beds I prepared for them yesterday. I started early hoping to beat the rain that was forecast, and I figured if the thermometer said it was 3 degrees I’d be okay, right? Wrong! It started to snow, of all things! Mother Nature’s definitely playing tricks on us.

Oh well, moisture is moisture. I planted the peas anyway and then put up my little platic arches and stretched row cover over them. Peas are very cold hardy and the row cover will act as a miniature greenhouse to keep any frost off the seedlings once they germinate. We’ve still got a week or two to think about building their trellis, and we’ll be going with a sturdier metal trellis design this year.

In other veggie news, last week I potted up the kale from its tiny cells in one tray to bigger pots so the roots will have space to grow before it goes out in the garden – one tray of kale became four trays in the course of about two hours. It’s finicky, painstaking work. Then I started more trays of onions, spinach and swiss chard, along with tomatoes and peppers. This weekend I potted up one tray from the first planting of onions, but I’m running out of trays so I’ll have to run into town to get more before I can start more brussel sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and beets. We’re running out of room on the seedling rack shelves, so I’ll be glad next weekend to get the kale transplanted out to the garden. I’ll have to pot up the first plantings of broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower soon, and that’s going to take up tons of space on the shelves!

We ordered lumber and sheet metal for sheep pasture shelters this week – turns out you need building permits for those, too. Plus I’m trying to get quotes for electrical and plumbing for the barn, and trying to get a hold of someone certified by the province to do a “nutrient management plan” (yes, that actually does mean a “poop plan” for the manure) before the city will sign off on a building permit for the barn. I swear, if it wasn’t for the gardening, lately this would feel more like office work than farming. But planting is so much fun, it makes up for all the paperwork. Planting’s almost as much fun as harvesting and eating!

Can you believe this weather?! It’s feels like June, but we’re not even at the end of March. We’re taking full advantage of this weather, though, and getting a lot of things prepped and ready around the garden. I’ve bought a ton of landscape fabric to cover the garden beds this year to help save us lots of time on weeding, so we’ll be installing that soon. It’s great to have labour-saving alternatives to the so-called “conventional” option of spraying herbicides, since that’s never an option at Our Farm. Mulch is great, and a wonderful soil-saver over the winter, but it’s not that effective in suppressing weeds – landscape fabric to the rescue!

We’ve been busy little bees with seed-starting as well. Mat will have to take some pictures of all the green stuff growing in our seedling room so I can post the pictures for you – cauliflower and eggplants got seeded last night, and that was after I worked outside in the garden until 8:00 p.m…. in March! (Still can’t get over this weather, can you tell?) Much more to come in the realm of seedlings, especially since I’ll be planting a little of this and a little of that every weekend until mid-August. It won’t be long at all until I’m planting a little of this and a little of that directly out into the garden.

We’ll be making more progress on the greenhouse this weekend, taking things step by step. The plan is to have it finished the weekend after Easter, so we can get lots of tasty, heat-loving plants like eggplants, tomatoes and peppers out there a bit earlier in the season and give them a head start on the season. Keep your fingers crossed!

So there’s your update on the vegetable front – on to the animals. I had already mentioned that the first batch of chicks have been ordered, and will be arriving on the farm May 2nd. We’re starting a bit later this year than we did last year, because when we tried to rush things last year and start our first batch at the beginning of April the temperature went down to -10 degrees the first night we got our little peepers! This year, we’re taking it a bit slower and stretching things out a bit. We’ve decided that our first two batches of chickens will only be 50 chicks each instead of 100, since this will be easier to manage while we get into the swing of things with the sheep.

And speaking of the sheep, we’re just waiting for the pregnant ewes to have their lambs sometime around the middle or end of April so I can go out and help with lambing. Then after the moms and babies have had a chance to get to know each other a bit and relax for a month or so, we’ll bring them all out to Our Farm for a fun summer on our pasture. We’re going to build a barn closer to the house for the ewes to shelter in over the winter, and you wouldn’t believe the amount of paperwork involved with building a barn and getting permits from the province and the city these days! On a positive note, we found out that the city doesn’t actually require us to get a permit if we want to put in a well to ensure we don’t overtax our house well with irrigating the garden and watering the livestock. With this being one of the hottest and driest spring seasons on record, we’re going to have to pay a lot of attention to our water needs on the farm this summer.

Bit by bit, we’re getting there. This time of year holds so much promise for the future!

Good morning everyone!

Today’s to-do list includes planting trays of beets, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, eggplant, swiss chard, and more onions, kale, and leeks.It’s going to get crowded in the seedling room awfully fast, but it’s such a fun time of year – the first seeding of kale is starting to look fantastic and most of the plants have their first true leaves. Just about everything else has sprouted to some extent or another at this point – even the celery, which is a relief because I haven’t always gotten good germination from celery seed.

Oh, and then it’s time to start prepping the brooder house for the arrival of the first batch of chicks – May 2nd is the arrival day, I ordered them from Kinburn Farm Supply yesterday. I’m going to keep the picture of cute little peepers in my head to make this cleanup a more pleasant task, but I recently saw a really applicable saying that makes me grin: “When life hands you a pile, just smile and say, ‘Whahoo! Fertilizer!’”

I went out a second time this past Wednesday to look at the soon-to-be-ours sheep, taking a veterinarian along this time to look over the flock and make sure everything’s going well with the pregnant ewes as well as just to give them a general checking over. Everyone’s doing well, and we’re really looking forward to hearing the baaa’s all over the pastures here at Our Farm.

To help everyone get in the mood for Spring, here’s a recipe based around a couple of things that will be in your first CSA bins this coming June: Sauteed Radishes and Parsley from the amazing Jen over at Nourished Kitchen.

Simple recipes are the best, aren’t they? All you need for this is 2 bunches of French Breakfast radishes, 2 tablespoons of butter, fresh parsley, and salt and pepper. Wash and trim the radishes on both ends (wispy roots as well as leaves), and once the butter is melted in the pan you simply sautee the whole radishes until they start to brown a bit. Plate the radishes, and garnish with the parsley, salt, and pepper. For anyone who has only ever eaten radishes raw, you’ll be amazed and pleasantly surprised by how mild and sweet radishes taste when they’re cooked.

So of the 11 trays that were seeded six days ago, we’ve already got almost a full tray of kale sprouted, and two half-trays of different kinds of cabbages are sprouted as well. The spinach and parsley will take a bit longer, and the onions and leeks will take a fair bit of time so I’m not expecting anything from them yet.

Tomorrow, I’ll seed the first tray of lettuce.

Anyone want to bet that by the time we get the cover on the greenhouse, we’re going to be wall-to-wall seedling trays in the farmhouse?

Long time no talk, everyone! We were very busy at the end of 2011 working on our new greenhouse, and almost got it ready to go in time for the freeze-up. Sadly, things got too cold for us to put the cover on (who knew plastic could shrink that much if the temperature is lower than 15 degrees celcius?!), so we’ll be finishing that up as early in the spring as we can.

In the meantime, we’ve been doing the usual winter farm chores (paperwork and taxes!), and ordering seeds to grow all your yummy and wonderful veggies for the year. A word of advice for everyone: don’t look at seed catalogues when you’re hungry! I’m sure I ordered way too much (who says 25 kinds of tomatoes is too much?!), but we’ll have lots of space for it once we move the hot-season vegetables into our new enormous greenhouse. And I’m not exagerating when I say it’s enormous – at almost 2200 square feet, this thing is as big as our house! The only thing left to order is our seed potatoes from Homestead Organics, and that brings me to a surprise for you all. In addition to red, white and gold potatoes, this year we’re going to add blue potatoes! They have all the beneficial phytochemicals that make blueberries a superfood, and think of how incredible they’ll look on the plates at your dinner table. What a way to start a food conversation!

We’ve already started seed for the garden, if you can believe it. This past Sunday we got 11 trays going with leeks, red, white and yellow onions, spinach, kale and parsley. I just went to take a peek, and about a third of the kale has already sprouted!

I’ll admit, I had been hoping the leeks would sprout first, if only so that last line could be a rhyme. Oh well, kale’s just as tasty!

We’ve got quite a packed seed-starting schedule this spring, and with the addition of the greenhouse we’ll have lots of tasty veggies ready to move out to the greenhouse as soon as it’s ready, and then out to the garden as soon as the weather warms up.

I have to confess, I love the irony in posting about starting green, growing vegetables and warmer weather when they’re forecasting a snowstorm with lots of blowing snow to bring March in like a lion!

The 2012 CSA contract is posted and there are just a couple of spots left. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions. Hope you’re looking forward to this year’s growing season as much as we are!

Hi there everybody!

So I’m pleading chickens as an excuse for not posting about last week’s harvest… we spent Saturday evening and a fair bit of Sunday packaging up all the drumsticks, thighs, breasts, wings, tenders and carcasses (for making soup stock) that we’ll need for the rest of the year. And then after that I was too tired to do more than my evening weeding and planting once I got home from my off-farm job. By the time Thursday rolled around I was rested up enough to realize I hadn’t posted anything, but by then it seemed a little too late. Will you forgive me? Please?

Thanks! Last week’s bins were a bit of a mish-mash as we were sort of between plantings. Everyone got garlic, potatoes, onions, carrots, swiss chard, kale and summer savoury (which you can hang in a well-ventilated spot to dry for use all year, by the way), but then you either got tomatoes OR peas, dried beans for shelling and cooking OR snap beans, and broccoli OR cabbage OR cauliflower. So in honour of last week’s harvest I should post a potato recipe, eh? How about

Mashed Red Potatoes With Garlic And Parmesan

So on to week 9. Can you believe that by next weekend we’ll be half way through the season already? Where on earth has the time gone? In the next couple of weeks I’ve got to get all my fall plantings in or the days will get short too quickly for things to grow. All the winter squashes are in already, but I want to get more carrots, beets, peas, spinach, radishes and maybe some bok choi since the spring planting didn’t exactly work out (you never saw it, but trust me, that’s because it didn’t work out!). Hopefully the turnips, rutabagas and parsnips will come along too.

This week you all got garlic, potatoes, radishes, broccoli, swiss chard, kale, summer savoury, arugula (a.k.a. rocket) lettuce (watch out using this in salads, it’s one of the spicier lettuces out there… you could try steaming it if you prefer a more mellow taste), tomatoes and tomatillos, sweet peppers, hot peppers, and beans (either snap beans or drying beans to shell and cook before eating).

Since tomatillos may be new to some of you and they can be a bit tricky, they’ll be this week’s recipe focus. The biggest trick with tomatillos is to remember after you take the husk off you need to wash them because they will be sticky. And the next biggest trick is to remember that you need to cook them – you don’t eat them raw like you could a tomato.

Chile Verde Con Cerdo (Green Chili With Pork)